I played 40k with Shawn this past weekend, it was a...480 point battle I believe. He fielded a Tau Crisis Commander, Kroot Carnivore squad, Stealth Suit squad, Pirahna with Gun Drones, and a Fire Warrior squad with attached drones. I fielded a Chaos Lord, and three Chaos Space Marine squads. He outnumbered me slightly. Heh. Things went as expected for most of the game, his range and weight of fire were matched by my very solid armour save and good toughness units. This battle was pretty evenly matched, the dice didn't seem to favor or spite either of us. I did completely fuck myself when i forgot the rules about shooting at vehicles and penetrating hits, which led to a squad of chaos space marines getting pretty heavily chewed up by his commander. We played annihilation but towards the end I got confused and thought we had a draw because neither of us had totally destroyed the other. Each squad is worth one victory point in annihilation, I had four (three squads plus my commanders) and Shawn had five (four squads plus his commander). I had my commander and the remnants of one squad at the end of the sixth turn (you roll to get a fifth and sixth turn in the game and we rolled high). I can't positively remember whether or not I took out any of his squads. I know his commander and fire warriors were still around and perhaps some of his stealth suits. I kind of recall killing his kroot, but cannot be sure, so it looks like he won. We are now 1 to 1 as far as wins, though I hate to call my previous game a win with the way his luck was that time.
I've found that my troops are durable, but they lack punch. Bolters and bolt pistols cannot compete with his pulse weapons, and meltaguns are too short range of a weapon to rely on for tankbusting and crisis suit popping. The point is, my list is too basic. Even an obliterator would have made the battle easier. A seventy-five point model is a bit much for a low point game, but I think I can swing it if we up the points to six hundred or so (which I just suggested to Shawn earlier today). I guess that is the plan for the next enhancements to my army. I want to have two full squads of Iron Warriors done and then at least be able to proxy rhinos or an obliterator. I need to be either more mobile or pack more heat. With my oblit deep striking with perfect accuracy near an icon I can somewhat negate the maneuverability of Shawn's crisis commander. That tactic relies on one hit with a lasgun or multi-melta and I think oblits have twin-linked versions of the multi-melta. They both penetrate the 3+ armour save of the suit, and I believe they are both instant death for the commander because they are double the toughness of the unit. On the other hand I could choose rhinos as my next augmentation (for about the same mother effing price as an oblit) and increase my mobility and just negate the issue of range by being right up in his face on turn three instead of turn four or five. I dunno, we'll see. I'll have to see what I can cobble together as a counts as obliterator and perhaps get the dimensions of a rhino to use something blocky as a counts as rhino while I paint up another squad of Iron Warriors. I'll probably try the obliterator first since that is the easier one to do.
Interestingly enough, one of the things I had the most fun doing was talking to Shawn about his tactics and units in an attempt to get them to perform better against mine. I really enjoyed the hypothetical discussion on how to fuck my guys up. It was just fun to kind of pick apart units and figure out different ways to use them and ways to counter them.
I bought myself a Black Templars upgrade sprue and assembled and primed it at Shawn's. Unfortunately I put the Gesso on too thickly and it did obscure some of the detail. Well, not obscure, but further paint would have. When I got home I kind of cleaned the dried Gesso off and reapplied it. The Gesso went on kind of lumpy and not smooth looking, which would only have been exacerbated by more paint. I'll be dunking the fucker in Simple Green here and completely removing all remnants of Gesso, then I'm going to try thinning the Gesso with water, which some people do and it might not be a bad idea to get a look at the results. We'll see. I really look forward to painting up a Black Templar, I have two pretty in-depth guides for them and both look rather nice so I'm hoping to have a nice model when I finish.
My orks are working out rather nicely. I think I've got all the basecoating done, except I need to touch up some spots of metal with Tin Bitz. I am going to have to play around with some different browns or tans or something because black pants are just not working for me, but I have brown boots so I'm not sure how that will work. I may just paint the boots black and the pants brown and just do all the leather straps on the pants in Imperial Blue like I've been doing with their gloves and armbands and will eventually do up their lucky tattoos in. They're orks, so if they're a bit of a mishmash of colors, its not a terribly big deal. They're fun to paint though, I do very much like the mess of colors I have collected to paint them with.
I think I'll spend a couple hours painting tomorrow while I catch up on the shows I haven't watched yet. Eureka is back on the air after a year break in the middle of a season (wtf?) and there are a few new episodes out, along with Burn Notice, and the first four or five episodes of the seventh season of Penn & Teller: Bullshit.
Brewed beer while I was down visiting Shawn as well, except that I fell asleep for a portion of it, so I don't exactly know what we were doing. I know there was some milling, and some heating, and some transfering. I just don't know all the details, other than the fact that the cooler where all the hops were stored smelled delicious, as did the milled malt (?) that we were milling. It is possible I need to get a book or two on beer brewing and read up. I almost did when we went to a bookstore, but I really didn't know exactly which one to get.
Speaking of books. I've got a stack of nine or so fantasy/fiction books at home, including two I'm borrowing, plus some stuff Eric loaned me for no real reason other than he wanted to. Even with this hefty amount at home, and my seeming inability to make progress on my exceedingly interesting Nikola Tesla biography, there is a pile of books I want to pick up. Oddly enough, they are primarily non-fiction.
As I said, I would like to find a book on beer brewing, if only because financially speaking it is a wise decision to brew my own beer rather than purchase it from stores (forty to fifty beers for twenty dollars was the math I could get behind FYI). I would also like to peruse something that would teach me how to identify flavors and qualities in the beers I like and how to achieve those effects through brewing procedures. I would like to find a book about the "wild west" and the whole era, perhaps more specifically something about the lawmen. Someday I would like to read up on World War 2 because of my family's involvement in it and I'd also like to learn a bit about the whole Nazi obsession with mystical relics and stuff. Not because I am exactly interested in Nazis, but more because I am interested in magic artifacts and enjoy the Indiana Jones films and Hellboy comics. I also just honestly don't know much about shit like that, I'm not a history buff of any kind but I think I'd find information about stuff like the Civil War and World Wars interesting. I think I'd like to read one of those "history of guns" type books. I've always been fascinated by firearms and their evolution. I even did a report about how the invention of firearms was responsible for the death of knighthood and chivalry and whatnot. I think something I should definitely pick up is some kind of book about the modern political parties of the United States and their tenets and goals and stuff like that, I know how I feel about issues, but I don't know what political parties, if any, feel the same way. I can watch the news and elections and debates and get information that way, but so much of those have been hacked up by television folks to be sound bites (bytes?) that tell me nothing, or they center on pandering to interest groups and religion and shit like that. I don't give a fuck about your religion and your relationship with Xenu or the Morningstar or Odin and how that relates to your views on abortion and the driving of your enemies before you. That shit has no place in politics, I want to know your politics and those of your party, tell me those and keep the prosletyzing to yourself. I guess a citizen should be aware of the agendas of the people who are "in charge" of his country (Spoiler Alert: The people in charge are the citizens, that's why I used quotes. Governments are supposed to fear the people, because the people outnumber those in goverment and have the right to bear arms and generally have something worth fighting for other than a paycheck.), at least as much as he or she can without going to a politician's house and saying "What the fuck are you about?" Finally, I want to get a book about the basics of the English language. It has literally been over a decade since I had any real education on basic crap like sentence structure and grammar and things of that nature and I think it would be extremely prudent for me to revisit the basics if I'm going to continue with my writing and such.
On the fiction side of the equation is the series known as the Saga of the Pliocene Exile. Its an older series from the late eighties I think. It is basically the Celtic cycle of myths turned into a Sci-Fi setting. Its a pretty cool idea, alien races invade and conquer early humans in the Pliocene epoch and are what Celtic myths refer to as Firbolgs and Fomorians and Tuatha De Dannan. Not sure on the exact plot of it but the setting alone seems like a pretty interesting read to me. I've read bits and pieces of the Wikipedia article about the series and it really does sound quite nifty. It looks like I'll only be able to pick it up on something like eBay or Amazon or used from Barnes and Noble used book sellers.
Music 1.0: Love On The Rocks - The (Mother Effing ) Darkness
Music 2.0: Australopithicus - Intronaut
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